Interesting read, in effect, the live room level defined the envelope of the added reverb in the original discovery at least- I was not aware of this detail.
Perhaps much more subtle and useful, (certainly more timeless...) is the technique of gating the bass guitar sound with the envelope of the kick drum, either reducing the volume of the bass guitar on the drum hit, or the dropping its volume except when the kick drum is hit.
Sidechaining is the technique of gating one channel with the envelope of another - doesn't have to be applied to bass guitar+kick drum - its also popular as a technique in synthesis, such as on a 303 acid line, gated by whichever part of the rythmn track is most relevant to the cause, or in eurorack modular context when one module is gated by another through a side chain signal. It is also highly effective when applied to vocals too.
I agree, there are countless both purely engineering and creative use cases for sidechaining!
My absolutely adored kind of sidechaining is spectral, that is, when it's not merely a loudness envelope of a source that drives the gain of a target, but when both are split into FFT bins and the envelope of each bin of the source drives the gain of the corresponding bin in the target.
That allows for carving out the target signal with the frequency response of the source, surgically. Works miracles is modern bass-heavy styles, along with spectral limiting.
There is one particularly amazing VST plugin at this, but I won't advertise here.
My inherent pedantry drives me to say "this sounds like compression, not gating". Do lots of people use "gating" to mean "automated volume control"? In 30ish years of hobbyist music production I have only encountered it to mean "automated in/out control". It's "compression" that automates dynamics.
Thinking out load a bit here:
- maybe the existence of West-coast style "low pass gates" proves me wrong...
- gates sometimes have release controls, which would make them "automated volume control", but I still contend that aiming for zero gain when the gate closes makes them in/out controls not "dynamics" controls).
This has always confounded me when presented as a first choice when developing something with value. I can't think of any other fields with so much practical value where all participants are practically shamed for not giving away something that is identical to their most commercially valuable skill.
Most of my life has been financed by closed source products I developed on my own to fill a real need and others had it too. Had I given them away, the best I could have hoped for was what, a job offer?
People in other professions do that all the time. Doctors go to serve in poor places so that they can have medical care, carpenters volunteer to help make furniture and structures for charity projects, and so on. It simply is not the case that programmers are the only professionals who will donate labor for the sake of the communal good.
However... those professions are encouraged to donate basic human needs/rights to those without resources. Yes, even tradespeople donate their time to those in need sometimes, but normally only to those in need.
Contrarily, open source can be easily observed to take resources in the form of created capital (ip) for less than full value or no value from the arguably more needy (individuals) and gives them to the not-needy-at-all (business).
More "bad news" and from the man who helped create and then promote Agile to dilute the value of software developers by forcing software development out of the control freak's nightmare where it started: seemingly esoteric, non-understandable by management, and make sure the next generation of developers knows their place. That's Agile's insidious purpose as far I am concerned.
As for AI-written code, I wouldn't fly on a plane controlled by AI-designed and AI-tested code, but much of development is busy work, not problem solving or design. AI excels at turning a protocol spec into a parser for example. I'll take that any day. AI excels at finding stuff, particularly non-code, thesis-level ideas for algorithms and also at about the same level, what's been shown not to work when solving a non-deterministic problem.
If we're lucky, AI will fill in after exposing who is only doing busy work and who is creating.
i had to laugh at his announcement that "otoh ai will give you the power to get all that coverage and cyclomatic complexity stats done in minutes, which you know doesn't really mean that the code is going to work".
also, his prediction assumes that ai will be able to learn from its own code going forward. will it also create its new programming languages and tools?
Your claim is that software developer value has been diluted in the past 20 years? Have you ever compared software developer salaries to the jobs with similar skill levels?
I will suggest that for sure it was way easier to get an engineering job in the 80's, 90's, even 00's. Offering one resume and getting one interview and one job offer soon after wasn't uncommon.
I was an employer for a decade in the 90s and I didn't think to haze any candidates or demand huge amounts of their time on speculation: I wanted honest people who were great problem solvers; you know them when you meet them. The first clue is they know about a lot of things outside of the field you are working in as well, this shows up as a very visibly and broadly capable person, making them notably self-reliant. Everyone I hired got up to speed and stayed until well after we were acquired.
As for my opinion on Agile: creating a management system to corral people without these skills doesn't magically create these skills for you in the aggregate; it might be more robust to the influence of one individual but that is a side effect of the real goal of hiring from a much broader pool, and ensuring that nobody is overly critical at the cost of headcount and ironically, agility in the business world to quickly follow opportunities.
When Alder Lake finally made a sizable jump, I looked at decades of old tests I'd done along the way with CPUs and tried to bridge them together reasonably.
Between IPC (~50 to 100-fold improvement) and clock speed increases (1000-fold alone), I estimated that single-thread performance has increased on the order of 50,000x - 100,000x since the 4.77 MHz 8088.
In human terms this is like one minute compared to one month!
That means relatively dirty combustion near where people live. The population density around fossil fuel power plants tends to be pretty low in wealthy countries.
You can't pump hot water the same distance you can transmit electricity on HVDC towers.
Kind of a stretch to suggest that an internal combustion vehicle requires 3x more "energy" to move it than an equally physics-burdened (weight, friction, etc) electric vehicle...
This is only "true" if the energy stored in the vehicle's battery got there without any relevant conversion inefficiency; If those joules came from a gas-fired plant, overall efficiency is only about 35-40%: comparable to a typical internal combustion powered-automobile or actually worse than a diesel automobile.
The upstream energy costs of supplying fossil fuels can also be counted. They add about 1/4 or 1/5th of the total in what are called "Well to wheel comparison". The comparison in the article is "tank to wheel'
It's not a direct analogue to energy but CO2 emissions per km are roughly 4 times lower for an EV charged on the EU grid in 2025, well to wheel.
This is particularly true of a deep psychedelic experience "inside" with IV Ketamine.
Your own internal processing will still determine how you perceive a perspective change, but specific to this idea in particular, you may for example, within, suddenly find it obvious to think of things as being made of something different than in the outside world reality (and this sort of "change of bases" may reveal some kind of truth not otherwise visible.) You may see something as formed of language instead of molecules and atoms, or vice-versa.
Yes. For example, IV Ketamine can yield not only immediate relief in a chemical sense, the treatment itself results in a fully-aware, balls-tripping, metaphor and symbolism-filled, time and space-warping experience in an entirely fictional space. With thoughtful guidance prior-to and after each experience, a series of them can, for example repeat a message until you "get it," or each may deliver a component of a profoundly larger message when they are combined, weeks later. What you do with it all will determine what you get from it.
Perhaps much more subtle and useful, (certainly more timeless...) is the technique of gating the bass guitar sound with the envelope of the kick drum, either reducing the volume of the bass guitar on the drum hit, or the dropping its volume except when the kick drum is hit.
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